The titles for the 2014 Photographer of the Year competition at my camera club have been announced. Oh boy.

For a while now I’ve been wondering what the titles were so I could begin working on them, and at club night on Wednesday we finally came up with them. From an original list of 66 titles submitted by the members we randomly chose the eight competitions to be used next year. They are, with the text that accompanied them as they were announced:

1. Signs of the Zodiac. Taking the literal and being creative the image should be based on something astrological not astronomical.

2. Objects of Desire. Perfect porcelain, pretty pearls, or tabletop with an exquisite attention to detail.

3. Pie R Squared.The area enclosed by a circle so anything round and flat (but not a circle!!!)

4. Mash ups.An image made up of several other images or elements. The image can be made in camera or in processing.

5. Bridging the Gap.The architecture of bridges, tunnels, even dams – if it is man-made and spans a gap it’ll fit in this category.

6. Patterns.Any image which demonstrates a pattern, from the close-ups on interesting architecture to a neatly mown sports field.

7. Lines.An image where lines make up the bulk of the image, buildings, ploughed fields or contrails.

8. Character.An image that will show the character of someone or something, a face or animal or building or a character perception in the imagination.

Stunned would be a good word to describe this lot. I’m to blame for two of the titles – Patterns and Bridging the Gap – and I obviously quite like them. Unfortunately Lines will be more or less the same as patterns so that isn’t ideal, and as for the mash up one – well. I can use Photoshop, but I’m hardly an expert. My skills are limited to light retouching and some colour tweaks NOT building an image out of nothing (or many images). The final nail in the coffin of next years competition seems to be Pie R Squared. That just doesn’t even seem to make sense, so no idea where I’ll go with that at the moment. Objects of Desire might be OK given that I’ve got a fair few modelling shots left in the library from this year’s efforts.

We now await the ordering of the titles. It won’t make any difference to the work we’ll have to do but will tell us which ones are printed images and which are projected. We’ll also find out the order of the titles, round one is in February which frankly isn’t far away. I hope that one of the abstract titles isn’t first, I’ve got nothing in the library for that.

So overall I think its fair to say that it’s a mixed bag of titles for 2014. The titles were chosen from what the members submitted and in an open, fair and random way so it’s just the way the cookie crumbles I guess. Overall though I’m hoping my 16 images in the Open category through the year will all be high scorers, because frankly the set subjects aren’t looking too good for me…